From: James Britt Date: 2005-04-09T23:45:44+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] Instiki 0.10.0 - On The Rails David Heinemeier Hansson wrote: >>>>> So, come on, let's have a popularity pissing context among Ruby >>>>> end-user applications. We may actually learn something useful that >>>>> way. Any takers? >>>> >>>> This is the sort of thing Ruby can do without, but happens anyway. >>> >>> Why do you think it is such a bad thing? >> >> >> Because it confuses popularity with quality. > > > The confusion would be a personal mistake, then. Alexey merely wrote > "most popular end-user application in the Ruby world", so he wasn't > taking part of any qualitative evaluation -- merely drawing a reasonable > interpretation of number downloads => largest reach => most popular. I > think that's a generally accepted chain of reasoning. Perhaps, but if so, then simply citing the download figures should be enough, rather than telling people how to interpret them. (And it's disingenuous to dismiss the implicit association between popularity and quality as perhaps a uniquely personal observation. Surely people believe popularity indicates some sort of value, else why would anyone bother citing it?) > > The record of the week with the most sales is said to be the most > popular one. That definition doesn't include the intensity of popularity > (user A buying both X and Y, but _enjoying_ the purchase of X much more > than Y), but the lack of resolution surely doesn't preclude the use of > popularity as defined above as a meaningful indicator. Well, apples and oranges. Costs nothing to download an app and try it out, see if it got any better than last time. I've downloaded Instiki a few times, but still don't care for it. Meanwhile, there are other apps I've down loaded once, they do exactly what I want, and I use them. No need t go download it again and again. (Out of curiosity, are the download numbers restricted to each current version, or cumulative for all versions over time? ) Overall, what I find annoying about certain claims (and this is hardly restricted to Ruby apps) is when an opinion or personal interpretation is presented as some sort of objective truth, especially when it is just as easy to cite observable data and trust people to be smart enough to come to reasonable conclusions. James -- http://www.ruby-doc.org http://www.rubyxml.com http://catapult.rubyforge.com http://orbjson.rubyforge.com http://ooo4r.rubyforge.com http://www.jamesbritt.com